There are lots of reasons why we end up as a fan of a specific sport (and,
no, I'm not arguing that you're limited to just one, but most of us do tend
to specialize at some point). A lot of them are aesthetic -- I loved
basketball as a player, and it televises well, but give me a choice between
sitting in a gym in December or sitting out in a baseball stadium in May,
and it's not a hard choice. Some of them have to do with our own physical
characteristics -- baseball and hockey require pretty good eyes at times
to follow well. Many times it just comes down to some formative memory
that builds a fire. For most folks, they don't even think about why they
like a sport, it just clicks with them.

For a lot of these folks, some of this can be traced back to the
predictability of a sport -- how likely am I to know the end result when
the game starts? Those who like a safe outcome, with just a dash of upset
thrown in to keep the mix from getting too bland, tend to become football
fans. Those who like to see merit rewarded but like a good bit of
unpredictability tend to become baseball fans.

For this study, I've pulled together comprehensive score data for the last
five years for a number of sports, and I want to answer three questions for
each of them. The first addresses the points above -- how predictable is
the sport? For that, I'm looking at this question: Given two teams who
differ by a given amount in quality, as measured by the ISR's, which seem
to work pretty well with all the sports given here with one caveat, how
likely is the weaker team to win? To look at this, I looked at the range of
quality within the sport -- how wide is the range between the best team and
the worst team? I also looked at the probability functions for each sport,
similar to the 2% per ISR point rule of thumb that works pretty well for
college baseball (in other words, a team with a 10-point ISR advantage will
win 70% of the time, ignoring the home field advantage), but couldn't find
a good way to present that in an understandable manner; maybe some other
time.

The second question concerns the notion of competitive balance -- how
likely is it that a team will be about as good one year as they were the
year before? For that, I'm comparing ISR's from year to year with a
correlation measure. Finally, I'm curious about how well the postseason is
set up for the sport. In other words, how good are their champions? I've
done this for eleven sports or variants of sports, and some of the
comparisons are interesting. I'd love to add soccer, softball, or
volleyball (or any other team sport you can point me to data for), but
these are the only ones I've been able to find sufficient scores for yet.

We'll start here, with the sport we know best (for those of you who are
fans of other sports and got here through Google or whatever, read this
anyway) and explain the different measures.

The range is the average of the lows and the highs in absolute ISR measures
for the five seasons. I don't discuss absolute ISR values very much
(they're designed to balance around 100 and form a nice normal curve over
the sport), but they're useful here to show the magnitudes of relative
quality in each sport. The tighter the range, the closer the worst and
best teams in the sport are, and the more likely an upset is in any given
game. College baseball is the most competitive (or most random) of the
college sports.

The competitive balance measure listed here is the result of correlating
the ISR value from one year to the next for all teams that played in
successive seasons in the sport. .87 means that a team that successful
in one season is quite likely to be successful in the next.

On the championship line, the first five numbers represent the ISR rank of
the national champion. If your goal for the postseason is to find out who
the best team is, 1 is good here. If you're a fan of "the excitement of
upsets", higher is better, I suppose. For all its faults, the college
baseball postseason has produced some fairly good national champions, but
it turns out that it's unusual for a team lower than about #3 in its sport
to win a title, so Miami's 1999 championship is still off the charts. The
last number on the line is the number of teams who competed in 2002.

For all the complaints about "faith and hope" (and the anti-trust
exemption, which means we get to see these lies told directly to Congress),
we have here the most highly competitive sport of them all. There's a
moderate correlation between success from year to year (which is actually
good, since you want well-run teams to continue to succeed and poorly-run
teams to be forced to make changes), but in any given game, there's very
little difference between the best and the worst. We also have the most
poorly-designed postseason I can find.

The range is actually closer than I expected, and the competitive balance
is at least a little more prone to volatility than college baseball. For
all the jokes about being a fan of, say, Vanderbilt football, it appears
that there's actually little less likely to be rewarding than being a fan
of a bad college baseball team (with the exception of college hockey, to be
noted later).

For all the CBS chest-thumping about the unpredictability of March Madness,
the postseason does a remarkable job of picking a team that's at least very
close to being the best. The only team outside the top 10 in the last five
years to reach the title game is Indiana in 2002; two years of the last
five have featured #1 and #2 playing for the title.

As the budgets shrink a bit from the men and the limelight fades a little,
things get a bit less competitive; as much as there are fabled programs in
men's basketball, there's really nothing there that compares with Tennessee
or Connecticut women's basketball.

The less random nature of basketball relative to baseball helps out the NBA
tremendously in the PR wars against MLB (although less so than a
willingness not to repeatedly denigrate their own product). The
competitive balance correlation is higher than in baseball by quite a bit,
but nobody's complaining in August that certain NBA teams have no chance to
make the playoffs, because they can let over half the league into the
postseason and still manage to quite predictably have the league's best
team win the title. Side note: Nobody does NBA pools, and gambling's
illegal in this state, but take San Antonio this year, although it's closer
than usual.

As a minor side note, I'm not convinced that the ISR's are the best
measuring tool for college football, since there are so few observation
points in a season. The wide range is due to the fact that I don't have
a source for scores that excludes 1AA teams. I'm actually somewhat
surprised that the top end is as low as it is; my impression (although I
haven't followed football in over a decade) was that the best team almost
always won. I guess the relative rarity of undefeated teams would argue
against that -- relatively speaking due to the number of games, the best
women's college basketball teams are actually more dominant than the best
college football teams.

For all the grousing about the lack of a real playoff, it's worth noting
that the best team almost always ends up as national champion; something
that's not as likely under any proposed playoff system.

Here we have an interesting paradox -- a sport where, by professional
standards, there's a fairly wide range between the best and worst teams
in any given year, but being good one year is only a slight indicator
that a team will be good the next year. It will be interesting to see
if the change in the way of producing the schedule will change these
numbers.

I'm on thin ice here, so to speak, since I know almost nothing about
hockey, but this looks like a sport with a huge gap between the haves and
the havenots that's unlikely to change. There's nothing inherent in the
postseason structure that I can see that would keep the #2 team winning, so
that may just be one of those weird coincidences. I don't have data for
1998.

Remember how little I knew about hockey? Subtract some of that for women's
hockey. As far as I can tell, there's only been a national championship for
two years now, so there's not even much history to look at.

We've got very competitive individual games, and a small but acceptable
amount of turnover from year to year in the good teams, along with a
postseason that produces a surprisingly accurate result, given the amount
of randomness in individual games. So why are these guys going broke?

Pitch Count Watch

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher
usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a
standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel
free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you.
This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have
caught my eye -- the general threshold for listing is 120 actual pitches
or 130 estimated, although short rest will also get a pitcher listed if
I catch it. Don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.